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Plane9 v2.5 released!

published on 12/7/2016 8:44 PM

One more release has made it before the end of the year reached us. The original plan was to focus on getting Vive support in but inspiration was surprisingly lacking and it didn’t help that I stumbled on a bug in Valves OpenVR library. They quickly fixed it once it was brought to their attention so this release now comes with oculus and vive support. It will try to start up using oculus first and if that isn’t detected it will start OpenVR for vive. There is a setting in the configuration window that you will like if you have both but prefer to use the vive instead of oculus.

The vive is mainly a standing experience and oculus seems to moving towards that as well. This posed a rather difficult problem since the scenes now need to work in VR while sitting, standing and walking around. I think I found a good balance with this so the scene should work well in all those scenarios but it’s not perfect. All scenes have been adjusted to support this and I’m happy to say that the end result was well worth it. Adding to this difficulty I also activated the layered support for vr scenes. Since all scenes have to be in real world units this worked surprisingly well. Some scenes look just amazing together like the sphere beat combined with inside cube where you can walk around this beating sphere. It certainly brings the music to another level and this is of course just the start. In total there are now 76 scenes that works well in VR!

But don’t worry that this is a VR only release. There are multiple major changes in other parts of the visualizer as well.

Bloom
The bloom has been rebuilt from the ground up and it looks much better now than the old bloom.

Scene combiner
Before each scene was rendered into a 8 bits per component surface and thus each scene had to do it’s own gamma correction. Since we can render up to 7 scenes at the same time this lowers the performance we get and the quality because of quantization artifacts when each scene is combined with the next. To help with this all scenes now render to HDR buffers. We then do a postprocessing pass that has the following effects

High quality gamma correction

Banding removal. Banding can completely destroy a scene and is especially easy to see in very dark colors.

Compute luma to improve fxaa quality

Simplifies scenes since all this is done for them

Can in the future skip gamma correction to output to HDR monitors

Speaker setup
A bug has been reported a few times that I managed to track down to users of a any speaker setup that isn’t mono, stereo or exactly 5.1 with front, center, back, sub. Those affected noticed that the spectrum were not that well matched to the music.

Removed scenes
Quite a lot of scenes have been removed in this release mostly because I didn’t think they matched the quality I wanted or just didn't fit as music visualizer scenes.

Example of v2.5

The full release notes

Added

Support for OpenVR and HTC Vive

Greatly improved bloom

Enable anisotropy for mipmapped surfaces. Brings large quality improvements to some scenes

Added global dither/banding removal for all scenes

Changed render target to be HDR for improved quality in scene layer composition and to prepare for real HDR monitors

JXR, HDR loader

Panoramic image support

Support point sampled textures

Show how long time is left before recording is completed

Respect pause and quit for oculus

Removed individual scene gamma and made it global for all scenes

Let the studio application log into it's own log file

Set transitiontime, sceneminruntime, scenemaxruntime from command line in recording mode

Support damping and rate decrease/increase for waveform

Better shader random functions

Fog shader function

Autoflush studio log file

Support for height textures in materials

Only allow the scene to change once because of silence

Enable layered scenes in VR for much greater variety. Can be disabled in options if your system can't handle it.

Play button on each scene in the studio timeline to quickly be able to see how the scene looks in its layered form

Ian: It could be that you only have a single scene type. Like only a single foreground scene but multiple background scenes. If that's the case it's a now issue. Workaround now is to have at least 2 of any scene type selected

I think my transitions are bugged. When the program is trying to transition from Scene A to Scene B, the transition effect is applied to a transition from Scene A back to Scene A, which then abruptly switches to Scene B without a transition effect. I wasn't noticing this error in v2.4. v2.5 looks amazing though! Blown away by all the visual improvements.

Will you be allowing people to make new scenes anytime soon? I'd like to make a scene with a custom image in the background to mix in. Is there any other way of doing this besides creating a new scene?

Daten: Only used scenes tagged with 'VR'
cr4zyw3ld3r: Check so the file created isn't over 4Gb if it is then increase compression
ThePyrotic: Click the little checkbox that shows up when you hover over a scene to add/remove it from the playlist

That did the trick, Thanks. Great piece of software! The only issue I had was when either the Cog or Flip tiles came up the VR would loose sync between the left and right eye causing a "cross eye" issue, but other than that, solid experience.

Don't launch using the "Plane9 VR" link in the start menu (It will be removed and works only on oculus).
Instead launch it using the 3d glasses on the playlist in the configuration window. If that still doesn't work you can enable the "Prefer OpenVR" in the options window.